


Cigarette

by rybari



Category: Namesake (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-24
Updated: 2013-07-24
Packaged: 2017-12-21 05:30:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/896363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rybari/pseuds/rybari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ah, you've got the kind of heart that could burn me out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cigarette

**Author's Note:**

> DISCLAIMER: “Namesake” is the copyright of Isabelle Melançon and Megan Lavey. This story/art is licensed under the Creative Commons as a derivative, non-commerical work. No profit is being made off this piece.

:: 02

They meet again in headquarters, and they are not supposed to: Nose has just finished drinking something bright blue and painful, and he coughs. “Hello, Bird.”

“Hey.” she says. She reaches into her pocket, taps out a smoke. “You look like shit.”

Nose smiles, gentle and genteel. “Hah.”

Bird lights it off of hers and pushes it between his lips. “Nothing like a good dose of lung cancer after you drink that kind of stuff.”

“I doubt that is something conventional medicine would advise.” he says.

She puts a hand on her hip. “I don’t think we’re the conventional type.”

:: 06

Bird pushes the blankets back as she lights up. Next to her, Nose is snoring. She expertly clamps the cigarette between her teeth as she pulls her pants back on, then shimmies into a shirt while keeping her smoke tucked behind her ear (which is technically supposed to burn you, but Bird has not burned herself in years. The haircut was an accident in her early teens that she kept because it was wicked cool.)

Nose murmurs and sits up when she’s done, and he sleepily yawns. “Good morning.”

“Morning.” She doesn’t kiss him, because she doesn’t love him. She does reserve a fond platonic head-pat. Nose blinks.

“Oh dear. Did we…?” he trails off. Bird sighs.

“Yes, and it’s not a big deal. Friends with benefits, Nose.” She makes a show of pointing to his phone. “You can look it up on that Google gizmo.”

“Very amusing.” Nose sits with a certain quiet dignity that is admirable in a man who does not have any clothing on.

Bird, upon consideration, places a cigarette on his bedside table. Then she finds her bag and leaves.

:: 09

Bird smokes with a grim determination that is lightly masked by mannerisms she picked up from old movies she watched as a little kid. She remembers how the women did it, their hands light gray and thin as glass, and how the men held theirs in firm grips and a wholesome smile, and how there was a certain trick to striking the match.

Nose calls it affectation, and she doesn’t speak to him, with his twitching hidden smile, until he laughs at her sullen expression.

“It’s charming.” he says, as Fish storms from the room in disgust, waving her hands at the smoke, “that you try to be something you’ve already given up.”

“What? A fifties housewife?” she asks.

“No. Normal.”

:: 11

“Really? You can’t burn?”

“How else do you think I stay pasty white?” she asks.

“Well. That would explain a lot.” Nose says. He leans over her to grab his phone and check the time. “We’ve got an hour.”

She feels terribly comfortable, in this hotel bed before they are meant to go and catch One’s target. Nose’s face has also become terribly comfortable to her, familiar, almost…trustworthy.

She hasn’t minded that he would whisper-scream ‘Emma’ in place of her name, given or taken or number. She also hasn’t minded that they aren’t, technically speaking, any sort of couple. Or that she was a replacement. Or that his hands were terribly warm.

Nose takes the drooping stick of nicotine and presses its live end against her collarbone. It stays there, smouldering, as her skin remains perfectly pale and unblemished, and she watches him watch the starved fire and thinks that yes, she does burn. He burns her.

:: 14

“You never told me why we stopped the whole benefits thing.” Nose says. He leans forward to catch the dying embers of her smoke, which is curling. She is a lazy smoker; she hates tapping her ash out.

She shrugs. “I got bored.”

Nose has (pardon the pun) a nose for lies, but he mercifully stays out of this one. Bird allows him to light up off her smoke, and for a few seconds, while they wait for his cigarette to light, his face close enough that she can see the hairs of his eyelashes, she thinks of a different universe, a different time and place and space, where there is no Emma and no Calliope and no Namesakes and no anything, and in that universe they meet at a bar and that is how it begins.

:: 01

It is a day after she has given up her name. Her fingers tremble as she lights her cigarette. She manages it, takes a lungful of sweet nicotine and tar. Her smoke comes out jagged.

“Do you have a light?” A man with a wry smile and broad shoulders, holding out his smoke. She clicks her fingers and scorches the end of his sentence. He whistles. “So the rumours are true. We have a firebird.”

The flame dances to her middle finger, and she uses this to light him up. He laughs. She scowls.

“Pleasure to meet you. I’m Nose – you?”

“I’m – ” her voice catches on unutterable syllables. “46.”

“Still not used to the name, are we.” Nose puffs away. “No matter. I look forward to working with you in the future, Bird.”

The name sticks. She will remember this meeting fondly, but that is only later.

**Author's Note:**

> (a quick disclaimer - :: 02 is not the scene which happens in-comic, I wanted to make it seem like he does that a lot. That's what I got from that scene. Bird didn't look very shocked, just worried.)


End file.
